Chris Beckett's Blog, page 28

Interview with Paul Semel

Interview with Paul Semel here.

US release of Dark Eden

Dark Eden came out in the US and Canada yesterday!!    Random House have sent me a bunch of N American blog reviews that have appeared so far, and I’ll post the links here.  Haven’t read them all but the ones I have read are pretty good.

o   http://pili-inlovewithhandmade.blogspot.com/2014/03/mark-this-book-monday-arc-review-of_7244.html

o   http://books-forlife.blogspot.com/2014/04/dark-eden-chris-beckett.html

o   http://shetreadssoftly.blogspot.com/2014/03/dark-eden.html

o   http://www.fridaynirvana.com/fiction/2014/04/book-review-dark-eden-by-chris-beckett.html

o   http://www.fromlefttowrite.com/tag/feed-your-reader/

o   http://www.sfx.co.uk/2014/03/24/coming-up-in-the-sfx-book-club/

o   http://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/scifi/giant-freakin-bookshelf-week-march-31-2014.html

o   http://www.myfriendsarefiction.com/my-to-read-list-for-march

o   http://anateasbookshelf.blogspot.com/2014/04/out-today-4114.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FNjvri+(Anatea%27s+Bookshelf)

o   http://thatvoice.net/blog/

o   http://carolsnotebook.com/2014/03/31/mailbox-monday-68/

Some thoughts on world-building

Some thoughts on world-building here (guest post on Suvudu site).

Ciemny Eden

Seems the Polish version of Dark Eden has come out without my noticing!   Here’s the cover.

And here is a very nice review in Polish, if Google Translate is anything to go by.

Room full of mirrors

I’ve always liked the lyrics of this song by Jimi Hendrix.

I used to live in a room full of mirrors

All I could see was me

Well I take my spirit and I crash my mirrors

Now the whole world is here for me to see

I said the whole world is here for me to see

Now I’m searching for my love to be…

It’s a hard and scary thing to give up the company of one’s own projections, and to step out into a real world which you can’t control, and in which will only ever be a small part.  But unless you make that step, you will never grow up and you will be forever alone .

Roughly speaking, that’s the idea behind The Holy Machine, though the influence of this song is more obvious in Marcher, whose main protagonist actually does live in a room in a room full of mirrors.

Room full of mirrors. Ben Baldwin’s cover image for Marcher.

 

Voices from Eden (2)

In an earlier post I mentioned that the 8 actors performing the new US audio book of Dark Eden have been working on a whole new Eden accent, not quite like any accent on Earth: a very ambitious and difficult task to take on.

Here’s a clip from Random House Audio, which shows where they’ve got to.  Tina Spiketree is speaking:

http://www.chris-beckett.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Dark-Eden-Web-Clip-1.mp3

(There is of course already a UK audio book, read by Oliver Hembrough and Jessica Martin.)

My garden shed

My best drawing to date: my garden shed in the spring sunlight.

A rigged game

In my other life (I work part-time as a lecturer), I’ve sometimes used a rigged monopoly game – a game where one person starts off with, say, ten times as much money as the other, as a way of representing the unfairness of life.  I used it in a text book too.   The point I wanted to make was  not only that life is unfair, but that it is so unfair that, if it was a game, most of us would refuse to play.

I only recently found out (thanks to Thure Etzold) that a rigged monopology game has actually been used as the basis of a psychological experiment to explore the effect of wealth on human behaviour.  Paul Piff observed games of monopoly between pairs of players, randomly assigned to advantaged and disadvantated positions.   Even though they knew the game was rigged to make it virtually certain that they would win, advantaged players would start to act in a more arrogant way towards their adversary.  If we are doing better than another person, the experiment seems to suggest, we start to feel superior to them, even if our rational head knows that our success is none of our doing.  Financial success means status, and status means we can push other people around.

This is consistent with other studies by Piff in which he found that, for instance, expensive cars are less likely to stop at pedestrian crossings than cheaper ones, and that better-off people in psychological experiments are more likely than poorer ones to help themselves to sweets that they have been specifically told are there to give to children in another study.   If you haven’t come across this work, there’s a PBS video here, and an article here.

Through endless skies

My son Dom and I have a habit of sending each other interesting songs that we come across, and he recently sent me this one, ‘Planet Caravan‘ by Black Sabbath, about the singer wandering through the universe with his lover.

Listening to it reminded me of one very simple reason why I write science fiction rather than realist fiction.  If you are going to make stuff up, why confine yourself to the narrow and parochial limits of our little patch of space and time?

It was twenty years ago today…

Well, maybe not today exactly, but it was about this time of the year in 1994 that I embarked on six months unpaid leave from my then job as a social work manager to write The Holy Machine.  An expensive decision, which looked at the time as if it wouldn’t yield much in the way of concrete results.   What I managed to complete in 1994 was a clumsy thing that I knew didn’t quite work, but couldn’t figure out how to fix.  It was was to be another three years before I thought of a way to recast the book in its present form, ten years before it was first published (by Wildside in the US) and sixteen years before it was first published in the UK by Corvus.  A long haul, but I’m very proud of the end result.

The wordless cover of the original Wildside edition. Image by Wilhelm Steiner